Bird Flu 1: Indonesian cluster concern; intro

There has been a cluster of 7 cases of H5N1 in a family in Indonesia with no obvious close contact with poultry for 6 of them. Current transmission method is unknown but human to human transmission is a possibility. The WHO site is probably the best site to check for news:
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/en/
The 23rd May 2006 update is a good summary of current knowledge:
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2006_05_23/en/index.html

The key aspects are:
1. There is no (yet) identified poultry to human infection path for 6 of the cases
2. No significant mutation of the H5N1 strain seems to have occured
3. No one outside the immediate family group has been infected in this cluster
4. 6 of the 7 infected have died

So, the feared mutation into an efficient human to human transmissible variant has probably not occured. However, it seems that very close contact with an infective human may result in infection. This is not particularly worrying and would not, of itself, lead to a pandemic.

Here's a BBC news story covering this and leading to some other good BBC resources on bird flu:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5011210.stm
One worth noting is this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4829858.stm
which may help explain how only very close contact with an infective human might cause infection.

The extremely high mortality rate (6 of 7) in this cluster compared with the very high 50% human mortality rate from H5N1 so far is worrying if human to human transmission has occured. One might expect a lower mortality should mutation leading to human to human transmission occur. It is plausible that this cluster, being all from same family, were more susceptible to infection and mortality than most other humans would be.

Apart from the WHO and BBC sites which are both well worth reading, here are some more about flu, avian and human:
http://www.fluwikie2.com/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84402/michael-t-osterholm/preparing-for-the-next-pandemic.html
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/AvianFlu/
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/AvianFlu/story?id=1706048&page=1
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/ (about the 1918 US epidemic)http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B80E760E2%2D9CF1%2D437F%2D93BF%2D7F0DF3EE2E30%7D&siteid=mktw&dist=
http://www.eswi.org/ (European, more tech than other sites, does anyone have a similar USA link?)

This site is more a 'marketing opportunity' than truly informative site about bird flu. Note the lack of recent news, out of date statistics, emphasis on scare stories, products for sale at first, second or third click on any item. Don't be taken in by the marketing but such sites (no doubt there are others as well as this one, lol) do sometimes have useful info:
http://www.birdfludefense.com/
Do take care with info from such sites. For example: the 1918 flu killed a relatively high number of young and healthy people, possibly because they had good immune system function - they effectively drowned due to immune response in their lungs. Would you think it wise to take medications to boost your immune system if you were infected?

The coming 2006 hurricane season

I waited till the NOAA came out with their forecast before posting about this. Here's the NOAA links:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2634.htm
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricane.shtml

Other places have concluded similarly:
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/promo-ad.asp?dir=aw&page=hurr2006
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/promo-ad.asp?dir=aw&page=hurr2006_2
http://forecast.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/

They are all forecasting another very active year but less catastrophic than 2005. Note that 2005 was a record bad year in almost every way and 2004 was quite bad, if 2006 is as bad as 2005 or even 2004 then hurricane probabilities for the next 15 years or so will be bleak - there have been pairs of bad years together before but not 3 in a row like 2004 or worse as far as I know.

Comments are being made about a significant storm hitting the east US coast further north than most people might expect. Yep, that sounds plausible. I have no skill I'm aware of for predicting hurricanes this far in advance but here's what popped into my head: mid July category 2 aimed at Houston; late August category 3 running up the Carolinas' coast; early October category 4 cutting across southern Florida.

When the season hots up these are probably the best first places to look for info, forecasts and warnings:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
http://hurricane.accuweather.com/hurricane/index.asp

The disturbing CACOR view of peak oil and overshoot; So long, hydrocarbon man

CACOR are the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome, I've recently found their site and their perspective is close to mine. The home page is here:
http://www.cacor.ca/index.html

The September 2005 proceedings are about oil:
http://www.cacor.ca/Proceed-Sep%2005.pdf
http://www.odac-info.org/bulletin/documents/Proceed-Sep05.pdf (alternate, duplicate, source)

A brief article in it just about sums up my view on what is likely to happen to humanity in the nearish future. It can be found on pages 16 to 19. Here's its beginning and end....

What to do in a failing civilization
By David M. Delaney
Copyright © David M. Delaney, 2005

[he begins...] "Can global civilization adapt successfully to degradation of the biosphere and depletion of fossil fuels? I argue that it cannot. Important elements of all constituent societies would have to be reformed. Reform would have to be radical and would be uncertain of success. It could be undertaken only in the presence of incontrovertible necessity—a necessity that will reveal itself incontrovertibly only when catastrophic collapse has become unavoidable. I conclude that those who seek to preserve civilization should plan for its survival in restricted regions."

[...and ends...] "A catastrophic collapse of the economy and population ofthe world is more than likely. We cannot escape overshoot’strap. What should we do?

First, who are “we”? Until now I have used “we” to refer to all humanity. If we insist that “we’re all in the same boat”, we shall all drown, because the one boat will sink. Those who hope to preserve civilization must accept that it is likely to sink into chaos in much of the world. The survival of some elements of civilization will require lifeboats that can be constructed only from communities, regions, perhaps nations, that are not now in overshoot. To preserve civilization at least some of these must choose to stay out of overshoot, establish independence in the production of food, energy, materials, and crucial manufactured goods, and defend their borders against the migrations that will tend to spread overshoot everywhere.

This strategy may fail. The necessary awareness and resolve may not develop soon enough in any of those fortunate regions not already in overshoot. Awareness and resolve may be prevented by the very institutional and psychological mechanisms that have been described earlier in this essay. Regions with resolve may be prevented from implementing it by superior governments or by economically or militarily stronger trade partners. But those who argue for survival of a community may have a better chance of persuading their audience than had those who argued for better management of global population and resources. They will have the advantage of arguing at a time when less fortunate regions of the world have begun to provide both unmistakable examples and unmistakable threats.

There is a great need for a culture of guerilla relocalisation—a movement that would have as its goal to partially prepare communities so that they may coalesce more readily into autonomous regions when the need becomes apparent. Richard Douthwaite has discussed methods that would serve these goals in his book Short Circuit.

Overshoot and crash may so damage the biosphere and deplete other natural capital as to extinguish humanity, or to reduce humanity to a few bands of wandering hunter gatherers.These possibilities are now beyond our control. We can only hope there will be enough world left to sustain at least a greatly reduced new civilization, and act to keep the final struggles of overshoot from precluding even that possibility."

The whole of those proceedings are well worth reading. As are the May 2006 proceedings which are about human ecological footprint and overshoot. Probably few of us in the developed economies are aware that per capita oil and grain production peaked over 20 years ago. Globally we are currently consuming more grain than we are producing:
http://www.fas.usda.gov/grain/circular/2006/05-06/graintoc.htm
There is a limit to how long that can continue without beginning to constrain population growth. Needless to say some more poor people in poor countries will be hungry and probably starving as a result already. That will be paralleled in oil soon enough.

Another stumbling was to here:
http://hydrocarbonman.com/index.html

Though it has only just opened there is something that rings very true about the place (to me, anyway), worth keeping an eye on. I particularly liked the "Peak Oil: Am I crazy, or what?" blog entry.

On one hand it is reassuring that others are seeing what I see, being truly mad and deluded is not something I wish for, but on the other hand it is utterly frightening and sickening thinking that what I anticipate will actually happen.

Peak oil 8: The climate change trojan

This is probably more obvious in UK and the world outside the USA since GW Bush has ordained that climate change isn't happening.

Anyone who keeps an eye on their weather, climate, local and global weather / climate statistics, will know the climate is changing. How many of the 10 warmest years since we started to properly record such data have occured since 1990? 10. Which April was the warmest in the USA ever? 2006. Coincidences? Nice dust bowl you got growing in the southern USA methinks.

Yes, the climate is almost certainly changing, and a good part of that change is almost certainly due to us humans burning fossil fuels etc. And it will almost certainly have a quite nasty and possibly unpredictable impact on climate, and on human, animal and plant life.

But the real tsunami of climate change will take decades to build, centuries to play out, millennia (or longer) to dissipate. The current UK 'dear leader', Tony Blair, bangs on about climate change at every opportunity, but about the only practical solution he proposes is nuclear power. Something smells.

The words 'peak oil' have never publically passed a serving UK government minister's lips as far as I know. But in addition to 'climate change' we are hearing more about 'energy security'. I say these are 'trojans', preparing the ground for what they know is going to come too soon to prepare against hence they dare not mention. After the fact this will be justified by: avoiding panic and premature collapse of financial systems / it happened too quickly to foresee / we relied on the IEA and they didn't tell us.

Am I completely deluded and peak oil is more than 10 years away? I hope so. But I am pretty sure maximum global oil (IEA all liquids definition) production will almost certainly (99%) never exceed 95 mbpd, probably (75%) never exceed 90 mbpd. Current production is about 85 mbpd and demand is growing about 2% annually. That looks like peak oil by 2010 to me.

The probable truth is: the realisation of imminent peak oil breaks the current financial and monetary systems since we are too late to effectively adjust to peak oil. In that situation governments and 'those that know' need to resort to trojans like climate change and energy security to get at least some positive change in place without letting the rabid cat out of the bag.

BTW, a good new PO intro is here:
http://www.omninerd.com/2006/05/17/articles/52
A bit too even handed to be realistic but is about as fair, unsensational and unscary as it is possible to be.

To redress the balance: PO will probably happen before 2010, there is no way short of a severe global depression to adjust demand to available supply by then, it will probably break our economic, fiscal, financial and monetary systems. It's not money that makes the world go round, that is delusion, it is energy. I don't know what happens then but it might involve billions of premature deaths.